The Eddie O'Connor Equation: Gangster or Wankster?
That vanishing hairline. That chip-on-his-shoulder attitude. That velour tracksuit. First playable character Eddie O'Connora likely candidate for a Queer Eye makover if there ever was oneexudes a certain working-class charm you just don't get in games. What's developer Team Soho's top-secretive formula for this brutish London gent? Let's do the math on how this ghetto-way star was built....

Jason Statham

Best known as Bacon, the hard-case working stiff from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Rough and rugged, he's guaranteed to drive the ladies wild and send the gents scrambling for a Cockney thesaurus. Remove baseball bat. Replace with pool cue.

Gregory Sierra

Multiply by psychotic, balding, mid-level narcotics kingpin Felix Barbosa, played by Sierra in the early '90s drug-bust flick Deep Cover. This guy's explosive temper and skill with a snooker cue add that special lethal something to the Getaway 2's new star.

Vinnie Jones

Add the wild glare and hard-man facade of this Snatch star. Be sure to shorten first name and add the letters "i" and "e" to it. Edward O'Connor: too stuffy. Ed O'Connor: sounds like a jazz DJ. Eddie O'Connor: an underworld loose cannon running amok in London!

Heihachi Mishima

Whisk and knead in all the scowling anger of the Tekken series' deranged martial-arts master. He comes equipped with the obligatory receding hairline, but we don't really need his powers to control electricity. Leave those at the door, Mr. Mishima.

Squeaky Clean Cockney Chimney Sweep Image

Quickly remove 1920s chirpy Cockney stereotypes. O'Connor must be schooled in 1990s Guy Ritchie gang warfare instead. He should be cleaning Yardie blood from his knuckles, not soot from chimneys. With a little bit of bloomin' luck.

Mister Rogers Wardrobe

Let's just go crazy, eh chaps? We want major characters sporting too-tight muscle shirts, but also all the latest outerwear from le ensemble de neighborhood, including 1970s green, too-tight, zipped velour sweatshirts. For no good reason.

Students, please review your lesson on The Getaway, last year's PlayStation 2 Grand Theft Autostyle driving game bent on building a living, breathing, seedy underworld of kingpins and Cockney-rhyming, Ford Cortinadriving hard cases with family problems. Some gaming magazine touted the "hyper-realistic visuals [that] really put Grand Theft Auto: Vice City's graphics to shame." That same mag also said, "The controls, aiming system, and camera all have major problems." Hold onthat was us. And we weren't telling no porkie-pies.*

A big seller that eluded critical acclaim, The Getaway proved that a minutely modeled recreation of Londoninvolving a painstaking photography process that took Brit developer Team Soho three yearsdoesn't make up for so-so gameplay. Oh, and sending out early screens of a sparkling Audi TT in an alleyway (scenes so amazing they could never hope to be re-created in a moving game) didn't help, either. But all that's in the past now. With the announcement of The Getaway 2due this fall for PS2Sony and Team Soho are promising a sequel that rights the wrongs of the previous game while avoiding a surplus of hype and trumped-up imagery. Ogle the exclusive screens on these pages and clap politely; they look like they're from the game this time.

London Calling
After spending three years modeling every bit of the citydown to texturing just the right shade of brickwork across King's Cross StationTeam Soho isn't about to up and leave their virtual London for the sequel. "The focus of The Getaway series has always been Central London," says Director Naresh Hirani. "It's on our doorstep; we know this city, both the tourist side and the seedy side. It's the perfect backdrop to tell many stories." The team is creating new locations to add depth and detail to the heart of the city, but according to Hirani, "There was no point in expanding out to the suburbs."

This allowed the level designers to don a variety of fetching hard hats, inspect all of London's newer building sites, and gather data on all the construction that's taken place since the first game. After all, this sequel kicks off two years after the events of The Getaway. "London has moved on, but some things never change," Hirani says. "New gangs have moved in, some old gangs are making new friends, some of the villains are getting desperate and it's getting dangerous." Like the first game, then? Don't bank on it. For starters, this sequel has a new cast, and prequel stars Mark Hammond and DC Carter aren't part of it. "There are some very obvious common elements and some familiar faces, but the new story is not just a simple continuation," says Hirani. The sequel instead features amateur boxer Eddie O'Connor, a small-time palooka who gets mixed up in thuggery. But like the original, which had players start the game as a crook and switch over to a cop at the halfway point, Getaway 2 will feature multiple charactersmore than two this time. "The idea behind the structure of the first game was to show two sides of the same storythe cop and the gangster, concurrent episodes in a gangster flick," says Hirani. "The second game builds on this theme by telling the story from a number of interwoven perspectives."

Keeping It Real
The developers are also still keen on sticking to the original game's strict "full immersion" aspecta design choice that deep-sixes onscreen indicators like health bars or city maps in favor of more natural and realistic cues. Instead of relying on a simple directional arrow to figure out where to drive, for example, players must watch the turn-signal lights on their cars. The big idea is to make the series feel more like a movie than a videogame, but the lack of game-style icons was also the target of gripes from many players and reviewers of the first game. Take the bizarrely annoying and inadvertently humorous "lean" move, which requires injured players to trudge off to a quiet wall somewhere and gasp like an asthmatic smoker to regain health.

So what's the solution for the sequel? "It's a tough nut to crack," Hirani concedes. "We have the seemingly opposing ideas of gameplay essentials and the concept we call cinematic clarity. The solution used in the first The Getaway was effective and elegant in many ways; we allowed the player to recover when he wanted, even in a gunfight, if he found a safe spot. The drawback was that it had the potential to fragment the game experience, as the player always had the opportunity to break the flow of action."

This time around, the health system will "fit in" more naturally and not be so irritating. "In the sequel," he says, "we take the principle [of total immersion] forward by having natural locations within the environment where you can regain health through the use of objects found there. We've also added the concept of threat into the health-regain system. This forces players to think more strategically about where they stop to recover." So no wheezing against a cocaine crate on a Yardie's manor, OK rudeboy*?

Team Soho is shoring up this sequel with a lot more variety in the on-foot and driving missions and much greater diversity of unlockable gameplay, making the game less linear than before. They've also overhauled the player control system, Hirani says, "giving the player pinpoint accuracy over the characters." Add to the mix some truly different locations (such as rooftop chases, a fully working Underground rail system, and the obligatory romp around a sewage system...hey, it worked for Lara Croft, didn't it?), multiple story lines, and on-foot fighting (specific to characters and locales), then subtract boats, planes, and online play (there isn't any), and you've still got a return to London worth waiting for...until zee Germans get there.

*Cockney slang for telling lies. At least that's what the bona-fide Brit who wrote this article tells us.